


pretend

by finalizer



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: F/M, now with a part 2!, pre-ASOUE, unnecessarily soft and completely plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-08 04:18:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15922709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finalizer/pseuds/finalizer
Summary: In which liquor is involved, a flight of stairs conquered, and a series of unintelligible requests made.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i blame s3 content withdrawal, and [my partner in crime](http://theocrain69.tumblr.com) of course

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> timeline: pre-asoue but otherwise open to interpretation

When it came to identifying the level of one’s drunkenness, balance was key — quite literally.

For example: Olaf walking in a straight line? Sober. In a straight line, swaying ever so slightly? By Olaf standards, still sober. Straight line, but reciting a monologue in an outlandish foreign accent or spontaneously bursting into song? Bordering on tipsy.

The Olaf scale didn’t tip to blackout drunk until he was irrationally overemotional to the point of tears, missing at least one article of clothing and wobbling so desperately he could hardly place one foot in front of the other.

And of course, worse came to worst when he stumbled to retrieve another bottle of wine from his dilapidated liquor cabinet, and on his return journey through the debris-littered sitting room tripped over a ratty feather boa and crashed face first onto the ground. Predictably, the bottle he was holding smashed against the edge of the coffee table.

The vast majority of the room took the brunt of the damage as the wine splattered in every conceivable direction, but Esmé herself was lucky enough to be sitting mere inches outside of the blast radius. She was often generously lenient in regard to Olaf’s drunken antics but understandably, this was final straw.

“Darling, I think that’s enough.”

“S’what?”

Olaf remained face down, his voice muffled by the tattered quilt he’d landed on. It was hopelessly stained despite numerous half-assed attempts at washing it in the past, and the bright crimson splotches from this latest wine incident merely added to its chaotic polka-dotted glory.

“You ought to go to bed, I think,” Esmé clarified, when Olaf made no visible move to get up, or even speak.

“M’good.”

Usually, Esmé would take that as a cue to leave him to rot overnight and scurry off to get started on her ten step evening beauty routine —he would snap out of it eventually and drag himself into a more appropriate sleeping position or, worst case scenario, nap on the floor — but for whatever godforsaken reason, Esmé found herself moving towards him instead.

“Right, get up.”

Naturally, Olaf didn’t.

“If you think I’m going to haul you upstairs, you’re only partially right, because as much as I’d love to drag you up by your legs and watch your head knock against each individual step, I’ve had a few glasses too much myself and can’t be bothered to put in the effort. You need to cooperate. Up. Get up.”

“I’m fine here. Right here. Right here is good. What’s the point of getting up? I — where did — where’d my other shoe go?”

It took a few minutes of cajoling and immeasurable quantities of patience to get Olaf to his feet. More difficult still was keeping him there so he didn’t immediately skew to one side or the other.

“You’re swaying like a pendulum,” Esmé commented absently, standing back to admire her work; to which Olaf responded with a confused grunt.

He took the initiative and made a valiant step forward. Esmé barely had the time to catch him before he toppled again.

“Alright, here’s what's going to happen. I’m going to put my arm around you here,” she said, and Olaf let himself be manhandled as he stared intently at the eye-pattern wallpaper on the far wall like it would unfold and whisper to him the secrets of the universe, “and then you’re going to hold on here. No, _hold on_. Don’t be sloppy or you’ll fall on your face again, dear. Right, there you go.”

The perilous journey towards the staircase and subsequent climb to the second floor was nothing if not equal parts exhausting and entertaining. Olaf mumbled incessantly about nothing in particular, his horrendously loosened brain to mouth filter making it an interesting few minutes.

Successfully reaching the landing was a joint effort only in theory, while in practice Esmé found herself out of breath from doing all the heavy lifting herself.

Olaf, ungrateful as ever, untangled himself from her bruising grip without so much as a slurred _thank you_ and teetered towards the bedroom.

He stumbled and barely had the time to jut an arm out to catch himself on the doorframe. Esmé hung back at the edge of the staircase and watched with the particular sort of morbid fascination she reserved exclusively for Olaf. It helped that she was decently inebriated herself, to find the whole thing quite amusing.

Once Olaf disappeared into the room, she sighed out through gritted teeth. She was tired, and a sharp headache was worming its way into her skull.

From there on out, she had two options: either she went back downstairs and whacked the temperamental television until it churned out some late-night reality TV, or followed Olaf into the bedroom to make sure he’d located his bed in more or less one piece.

She pursed her lips as the internal conflict raged within her for a lengthy three seconds, then headed for the doorway. Mirroring Olaf’s movements, she tripped over the same loose floorboard as he had and cursed violently under her breath.

There was a single light on in the room — a filthy lightbulb shrouded in a yellowed lampshade, standing atop an overturned cardboard carton that served as a makeshift bedside table. It clashed with the pale blue moonlight seeping in through the window, giving the room an eerie glow.

Olaf himself was sprawled out on his back, one leg hanging off the side of the bed like he'd attempted to throw himself onto it and missed, and now had to keep himself propped up to avoid sliding off completely.

The floor creaked as Esmé stepped inside and he turned his head ever so slightly in her direction, cracking one eye open to peek.

“I thought you went back downstairs. But you didn’t. That’s good. I can’t sleep. M’not sleepy. Read me something.”

Esmé assessed the situation from her spot by the door.

“A bedtime story?” she asked, her tone toeing the line between teasing and outright mocking.

“Or the phone book. Or anything,” Olaf mumbled.

She blinked. “The phone book?”

Olaf’s head dropped back down onto his pillow. “I just — want to listen to your voice.”

“My voice,” Esmé echoed blankly.

“I mean — accent. Very posh, very I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Also, everything is spinning. Am I upside down? No, I’m not. Read something, would you?”

The rational part of Esmé’s brain noted that he was piss drunk and babbling. On the emotional front, however, she found the babbling ever so slightly endearing. The latter won over. She wasn’t sober enough to think rationally.

“Aw, would you look at that? _Now,_ you want to listen to me talk, but every time we — ” she paused, looking for a safe alternative to the word _argue_ , because the word itself often sparked conflict, “ — have a civilized yet loud disagreement you clap your hands over your ears and go on about how you can't stand the sound of my voice grating on your fragile nerves.”

There was no reason at all to throw that in Olaf’s face, especially given the fact he wouldn’t remember any of it come morning. It was fun to torment him, though.

Olaf blinked up at Esmé with bleary eyes. She raised an eyebrow in challenge.

“I don't understand a word you’re saying, but please never stop talking.”

“You’re insufferable.”

Olaf took a deep breath. “You wanna order kebabs? I don’t have any cash, though, but you probably have cash. And I really want a kebab.”

Esmé’s already remarkable patience was wearing thin. She dragged the heels of her hands over her eyes to keep the oncoming headache contained for the time being, then grimaced at the smudges of mascara and glitter left behind on her palms.

At some point during her valiant attempt at rubbing her hands clean, there came a clank from the general direction of Olaf’s bed. Esmé looked up to find that he had somehow acquired a half-empty bottle of brandy, seemingly out of thin air. It was exceptionally comedic, watching Olaf struggle to sit up just enough to drink from it.

Generally speaking, yes, Esmé was a cruel person, but even that had its limits. She couldn’t watch idly as Olaf drank himself sick —well, _sicker_ — and dribbled all over the sheets in the process.

She took a long stride forward and snatched the bottle from his hand before he completed his glorious task. She set it down ever so gently on the pseudo bedside table, but even that slight pressure irreparably dented the entire right side of the carton. Gravity took hold and soon enough both the bottle and the filthy lamp threatened to slip off the edge.

Esmé irritably took one in each hand and deposited them on the floor a safe distance away — the lamp was decrepit and the liquor flammable, and fire was fun, but perhaps not at the given moment.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but poor theatrical reviews are hardly reason enough to damage your liver — ” she snapped.

“I don’t know what you’re saying. You’re talking too fast. If this is about my liver, I feel like it’s ten years too late to be worrying about that.”

“ — especially when the review is penned by an overdramatic writer so far up you-know-who’s arse that he’d bash Shakespeare himself simply because he isn’t _her_.”

Olaf mumbled something unintelligible, then, “Are you talking about Snicket?”

“In as vague terms as possible, yes.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Snicket hates Shakespeare. Wait — which Snicket?”

“Lemony,” Esmé replied, quite exasperated.

To which, foreseeably, Olaf made a loud, disagreeing sound and spat, “Don’t say that name.”

Esmé threw her hands up. “That’s exactly what I was trying to avoid doing, you daft bastard. Just — go to sleep, clear your head. Maybe you’ll understand the intricacies of human interaction better in the morning.”

“You’re using big, tough words ‘cause you wanna annoy me, aren’t you?”

Esmé scoffed (because he was right) and turned to leave. Her usefulness had run its course — Olaf was safe and sound in bed and posed no immediate threat to himself or his surroundings.

On her way out, she made a special effort not to tug on the threadbare carpet lest she set off a chain reaction of haphazardly arranged objects slipping and shattering all around the room.

She was halted in her tracks by a slurred, “Where’re you going?”

Olaf was slouched on his side now, arms curled around his pillow. He’d folded it in half and cradled it tenderly like a box of wine.

Esmé considered him with a stony expression, but couldn’t help the involuntary twinge of sympathy that shot through her at the sight of his tired, reddened eyes.

Still, she was a reasonable adult woman and refused to be manipulated by an irresponsible alcoholic’s bright blue puppy eyes. “I’m going to go downstairs and see if there’s anything in your fridge that hasn’t been expired for three weeks, and then I’m going to go sleep on the couch in the sunroom since you made a mess all over the comfortable one in the parlor.”

“Stay here.”

She raised her brows in mild disbelief.

Olaf went on, “I won’t throw up on you. Promise. I don’t do that anymore. I’ve developed super — superhuman tolerance to hard liquor.”

“I’m amazed you pronounced all those multi-syllable words coherently in a logical sentence.”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Anything to get you to stay.” He paused and his forehead twisted in a frown. “But don’t make me say it again because I can’t remember what I said anymore.”

Esmé felt her posture growing hesitant. It was like her body was physically drawn to the idea of crawling into a comfortable bed for a few hours and forgetting anything else existed.

It was unfortunate how humans innately craved closeness and warmth, and that she, as a human, experienced those very desires. It often put a damper on the stone-cold bitch facade she tried so desperately to put on.

Still, the weakness won.

“Fine, I’ll stay. After I go down and check the — ”

“There’s nothing in the fridge. Don’t go. I looked earlier and all that was in there was my participation trophy from my middle school drama club graduation performance, and a hardboiled egg in a Ziplock bag, but don’t eat that.”

“Why was that in there?”

“The egg?”

“The — no. Doesn’t matter,” Esmé conceded.

Olaf shrugged with the one arm that wasn’t squeezing his pillow. “Like I said: kebabs.”

Esmé bit at her lip distractedly for a moment before taking a step in the direction of the bed. She didn’t want to seem too eager, after all.

Olaf, though his thought processes and physical capabilities were somewhat hindered, was courteous enough to squirm himself away from the side of the bed to make space.

Esmé gingerly sat down on the edge and paid no mind to the violent squeal the bedframe made in protest. The bed had survived far more strenuous activities in the past — if it was going to break, it would’ve done so already.

“You do realize, darling, that if we order kebabs, somebody’s going to have to go downstairs to fetch them from the delivery man.”

Olaf’s free arm twitched in response, as if he were about to grab at Esmé to bodily prevent her from leaving.

“Fine, no kebabs. Just stay.”

Esmé’s lips threatened to fold into a fond smile, and she let them.

She huffed a sigh and leaned over to switch off the lamp. For good measure, she nudged it further towards the wall and away from the brandy bottle and various other haphazardly scattered objects.

“This house is a fire hazard, you know that?”

“It’s poetic,” Olaf muttered back. “You know what they say: find what you love and let it kill you.”

The light went out and plunged the room into darkness. The moonlight bounced off the heaps of knick-knacks stacked upon ornate furniture, casting twisted shadows dancing on the walls.

Esmé drew herself upright. “You’re utterly plastered.”

“Takes one to know one,” Olaf quipped. “Come here.”

“That’s not what — ”

Her retort was cut tragically short as Olaf grabbed her with surprising strength for someone in his condition and pulled her down beside him.

It was quite unlike him, this show of affection, but liquor always did bring out unfathomable parts of his personality. Sometimes it resulted in the kind of possessiveness that manifested itself in the childish grabby hands motion he’d make when he wanted something so much it hurt. She thoroughly enjoyed it, when it was her he wanted.

Esmé let herself be smothered half to death by the comforter Olaf dragged over them both, and closed her eyes in contentment when he wrapped an arm around her to pull her close.

It would all be over once the sun rose and Olaf’s drunken stupor dispelled along with it, but for the time being it was nice to close her eyes and pretend it was real.

Stillness eventually washed over the room, punctuated every so often by a brief clatter as a car sped down the street outside.Their breathing evened out and mingled with the rattling wind. 

But peace, of course, was never an option.

Olaf’s voice was jarring in the darkness. “Is that bottle of brandy still — ”

“No. Go to sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](http://twitter.com/finaiizer) & [tumblr](http://esmesqualor.tumblr.com)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part 2 accidentally happened [shrug emoji]

Even stranger than waking up without an aching hangover was waking up to an empty bed.

Esmé blinked rapidly to dislodge something that’d gotten stuck in her eye — a speck of glitter, perhaps, or a stubborn clump of mascara that she really ought to have washed off the previous night. Such were the unfortunate results of dozing off, warm and comfortable, with one’s makeup on.

She ran a hand through her hair to brush it out of her face, scowling at the tangled mess it’d become, before rolling over onto her back.

The window was cracked open and various sheets of paper on and around the desk at the far end of the room were rustling in the breeze. It was light out, but not too bright, and the street was quiet; it was early.

Olaf’s absence was unusual considering his rage-fueled drinking sprees usually lasted well into the night, and their after-effects well into the next afternoon. Esmé considered, briefly, that he might have simply fallen over his side of the bed and was now snoozing on the floor, but the way his sheets were folded aside pointed to him leaving the room consciously and of his own accord.

A perfectly timed crash and subsequent unintelligible yelp from downstairs confirmed that particular suspicion.

“Idiot,” Esmé muttered to nobody in particular, and pushed herself up into a sitting position. Much to her displeasure, she realized she’d fallen asleep in the sort of tight-fitting clothes that made getting up the next morning an agonizing nightmare. She didn’t spent too much time on self-pity — regret of some variety was always an aftereffect of drinking.

Step one was to drag herself out of bed and to the bathroom across the hall. While various thunks and bangs continued from downstairs, Esmé’s makeup came off, then the clothes followed suit. The process was a lengthy drag that she’d grown accustomed to over the years.

Ultimately, she decided a proper shower could wait, instead wrapping herself in one of the bathrobes that hung on the bathroom door. A great deal of her belongings had taken up residence in Olaf’s house over the past years, and the notion was strangely comforting.

Now, step two was more daunting. It involved going downstairs and facing whatever the hell Olaf was doing to cause such an abysmal early morning ruckus.

Esmé followed the piercing sound of a shattering glass to the kitchen and paused in the doorway to properly take in the unfolding situation.

The room was a wreck as usual, now with the added chaotic ensemble of Olaf, dressed in the previous day’s clothes, standing amidst open cupboards holding one broken wine glass and the detached handle of a frying pan.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Olaf, so distracted by his predicament that he’d not heard her come in, jumped at the unexpected voice and dropped everything he’d been holding. The glass smashed on the floor and Olaf scowled at it, then at Esmé.

“Most people start with _good morning_.”

“Good morning. What the fuck are you doing?”

Olaf’s face twisted into a vaguely amused half-smile before returning to its former perplexed frown. He turned his attention back to the task at hand, whatever it was.

“I’m looking for — uhh,” he trailed off and ducked down to search the cabinet beneath the sink. Tossing a couple of dented macaroni cartons to the side, he growled under his breath at the otherwise empty expanse of said cabinet. “The, um — ”

Esmé crossed her arms over her chest in the universal gesture for _take your sweet, sweet time_.

Exasperated, Olaf sat on the floor in apparent defeat amidst the mess he’d made. He craned his head over his shoulder to check if his observer was still there.

“Huh,” he mused aloud, quite eloquently, “you don’t look like shit.”

Esmé blinked. “Thank you?”

Olaf grunted as he clambered to his feet, using one of the rickety chairs beside the table for support. Aside from a single stumble, he seemed wide awake and not at all the hungover mess Esmé had expected to find. Perhaps the superhuman tolerance he’d rambled on about extended to the consequences of excessive drinking as well.

He leaned against the counter in an attempt at nonchalance.

“I can see your eye twitching. It’s not even eight and you already want to kill me. What I meant,” he elaborated, “is that you washed your face and everything. I sort of thought you’d come down sometime past noon with raccoon-like smudges under your eyes and your hair all poofy and plastered to one side like that morning after we went to the theater. Remember? You pinned it up all fancy to hide the fact that you hadn’t dyed it in a while, and then the next morning you looked like you’d barely survived a nuclear blast. What was the show that night? I mean, I wasn’t paying attention. We were sort of — ”

He caught a glimpse of Esmé’s unimpressed, murderous glare and snapped his mouth shut. Some things were better off unmentioned, such as any implication that Esmé ever looked anything other than radiant and utterly perfect.

“I mean, you look good,” he corrected himself, idly picking up a stained casserole dish to inspect the inside. “Pretty.”

“I’m flattered,” Esmé said, though she was certainly not flattered — quite the opposite, in fact.

Ever since Olaf had first seen her without makeup and thrown around words such as _pretty_ , _adorable_ , and _sweet,_ Esmé had made a conscious effort to gravitate towards the shades of lipstick sure to put the fear of god into a man’s heart.

At that moment, a jar of something goopy and unidentifiable rolled off the countertop and shattered on the floor. Olaf, shaken, recoiled and dropped the casserole dish, which also shattered.

His gaze flicked from the mess of porcelain shards to Esmé’s unreadable expression, and he pursed his lips in something akin to embarrassment.

“To be fair,” Esmé said, in his defense, “you did drink a smidge more than I did last night. You’re bound to smash a glass or two. But that still doesn’t explain the — whatever it is you were looking for to turn the entire kitchen into a war zone.”

“French press,” Olaf said. “I was in the mood for coffee, and I found the beans and even a semi-functioning grinder — it works if you plug it in and hold the cable up like this — but not the damn — ” he paused and groaned inwardly. “Shit, I could've just put the coffee in a filter and stuck that right in the mug and poured hot water over it, or used a strainer — ”

“You can still do that,” Esmé interjected before his oncoming rant spiraled into the sort of senseless tirade that ended with various objects thrown around the room. “Or we can just stick to tea.”

“You know, as of late the mere idea of tea makes me angry.”

Esmé offered him a patronizing look. “You can’t let them control your life like that. Make yourself tea and reclaim one of the simple pleasures they stole from you. And add too much sugar, to spite them.”

Olaf eyed her for a moment and then huffed. “You always know exactly what to say, love. You make me want to be a worse person.”

“Well, now I’m properly flattered.”

With that, Esmé reasoned it was finally safe to enter the kitchen, rather than linger by the doorway. It was always a good idea to keep one’s distance at first, in case Olaf threw a fit and a hasty exit was necessary.

Careful not to step in anything wet, sticky, or haphazardly splintered, she made her way to the table. The chairs were stuck to the flooring for some ungodly reason, and Esmé was forced to roughly yank at one to dislodge it. She sat, mildly disgusted, but mostly used to the disorderly environment by now.

Olaf had taken the initiative and was ambitiously pouring water into the kettle, whacking the faucet every time it starting spurting erratically.

Esmé watched as he plucked an ornate porcelain cup out of the furthermost cabinet, and she absently rapped her nails on the tabletop as he set the kettle on the stove.

Her head felt heavy and her eyes threatened to droop closed — a nap was necessary later in the day. A part of her wished she could work up the same alcohol tolerance as Olaf, though she wasn’t interested in the liver damage that came along with it.

“Olaf, darling, common courtesy dictates you ought to serve your guests as well as yourself.”

Olaf frowned.

She shot a pointed look at the single cup and saucer he’d set out for himself.

Missing the point completely, Olaf responded with, “You’re not my guest, you’re my — ”

He stopped mid-sentence like his brain had short circuited and stood unmoving in silent confusion. There was nothing quite like an existential crisis spurred on by a night of heavy drinking and a missing French press.

The sight of Olaf frozen solid, eyes unseeing, zoning out in an attempt to come up with an appropriate label for their relationship was inexplicably eerie. He didn't do _dating_. Esmé knew that.

“Just boil more water,” she snapped, before Olaf’s brain fried itself from the effort.

There would be another time to discuss what the hell they were doing with each other, and where they stood in the grand scheme of things, whether there were feelings involved or merely a deep sense of mutual understanding — but that conversation would unquestionably require copious amounts of alcohol and possibly other illicit substances.

A short while later, there was a second cup on the counter beside the first.

Olaf, apparently having burned himself in the process of refilling the kettle, was shuffling awkwardly by the sink with his left forefinger in his mouth.

“Idiot,” Esmé muttered again, inaudibly (because Olaf, bless his sensitive artistic soul, would feign offense) and a tad bit more fondly than before.

The kitchen fell quiet then. Olaf stuck his injured hand under a cold stream for longer than strictly necessary, and the metallic pang of the trickling water hitting the basin of the sink seemed louder than it really was.

The stock-still calm was eventually replaced by the ear-piercing whistle of the boiling kettle growing to a crescendo.

Once the faucet was switched off and the tea steeping, Olaf picked both cups up from the counter and swerved around to deposit them on the table in front of Esmé.

He then turned back around to scour the cabinets for something else, eventually pulling out a ziplock bag full of crumbled sugar cubes from beneath a withered carton of granola cereal. It was a complicated process, during which he accidentally dislodged a lone can of corn, sending it rolling off the shelf, to the ground, and across the room.

He tossed the sugar bag onto the table beside the cups and Esmé eyed it warily.

“It’s just sugar,” he assured her.

Esmé’s eyes narrowed further. “It’s your choice of container that worries me.”

Olaf only barely refrained from rolling his eyes to the back of his head. Instead, he grit out a tried sigh.

“You know,” Esmé went on, “why don’t we take this to the dining room? Cleaner table, big, lots of morning light. Not as crammed or as — filthy,” she finished bluntly.

“No can do,” said Olaf. He dumped an inordinate amount of sugar cubes into his cup and swore under his breath upon realizing he had nothing to stir his tea with. “You see, the troupe didn't clean up after the last rehearsal yet. The table was the stage. One of the feather boas got ripped to shreds and there’s pieces of it stuck all over because there was maple syrup on the floor. I’ll spare you the details.”

Esmé stared at him.

He shrugged. “Just saying. I don’t want to offend your _oh-so-delicate_ sensibilities.”

Esmé took another moment to wonder what the hell she was doing sleeping with this horrid mess of a man on a semi-regular basis, before turning her full attention to fixing her own tea.

“I’m assuming you don’t have spoons,” she stated.

“Not clean ones.”

“Right.”

In a matter of seconds, Olaf withered under Esmé’s cold stare and scurried off to search the kitchen for something that would get the job done — in this case, a pair of chopsticks to stir the tea.

Esmé took a sip from her cup, then cleared her throat with a burning intensity.

“Right,” she repeated. “The idea, now that you’re relatively sober and no longer crying about Snicket’s rotten review that ruined not only your day but your whole life apparently, is to plan your vengeance.”

“Don’t say his — ”

Esmé interrupted. “But it’s so fun to watch you squirm. What is it between you two anyway? What happened?”

Olaf didn’t grace her with an answer, instead clenched his jaw and stared into the dark depths of his tea.

“I still owe that bastard for what happened at the warehouse,” Esmé continued once it was clear that Olaf wasn’t going to talk about his murky past. “That incident involving oodles of spilled kerosene and a handful of people whose names you don’t want uttered under your roof — I still have that scar. If you want to teach him a lesson in minding his own business, I’m in.”

Olaf tilted his head in thought, then recognition struck. “Ah, yes — you were bleeding all over the place. And then after we stayed at that quaint hotel with half the neons burned out so it just spelled _HO_.”

Esmé blinked. “Not the point.”

“Funny story, though. I'd forgotten all about that.”

“The point is,” she steamrolled on, “is that if there’s anything we’re good at it’s planning and delivering comeuppance to the lot of them.” She paused, then, “ — hell knows we can’t do anything else together without it ending in a fight. And to be fair, sometimes we do disagree over the plots as well, and quite violently, but not as often as we do about other things.”

Olaf sipped at his tea and considered that for a moment. “Drinking. We tend to have a great time when we drink.”

“Darling, it’s mid-April and we’ve already broken up five times this year alone — one of those times over which bottle of Schnapps to buy.”

Olaf set his cup down and jabbed his finger out at Esmé to emphasize his words. “Yes, but I apologized, and it’s the count that thoughts. Thinks. Wait. Thought that counts, that’s right.”

He squinted and mentally ran through his words once more to make sure he was getting his point across in more or less the correct order.

Esmé fixed him with a look, but couldn't fight off the warmth and affection she felt seeping out from somewhere deep down like hot blood from a gaping knife wound. It was worrying.

Forcibly, she cleared her thoughts and said, “Well, we don’t fight when we drink because we’re drunk. Everybody puts aside their differences when they’re drunk.”

Olaf hummed in disagreement. “Not you and Jacquelyn. Remember when — ”

“So,” Esmé interjected, quite desperate to change the subject as quickly as possible. Everybody had their off-limits topics, and that particular evening just happened to be one of hers. “Revenge?”

Olaf smiled. It was deliciously evil. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Well, nothing concrete yet. We’d have to sit down and really put our minds to it to come up with something particularly cruel.”

“Nothing like a brainstorming session to catalyze a lengthy screaming match,” Olaf pointed out.

Esmé tsked. “Oh, please. When good old fashioned revenge is at stake we get on like — well, like a house on fire.”

The turn of phrase was the cherry atop the metaphorical cake. Esmé’s lips twisted into a dangerous smile and Olaf, in turn, looked properly pleased for the first time since reading Snicket’s atrocious review the previous afternoon.

He lifted his cup in an apparent toast, sloshing the tea everywhere, and mirrored Esmé’s smile.

“I’ll drink to that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](http://twitter.com/finaiizer) & [tumblr](http://esmesqualor.tumblr.com)


End file.
